NBC's  Chris Matthews Show (10/30/11):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Welcome back. Bob, tell me something I don't know.

BOB WOODWARD: That the White House has a secret plan to win the election and it's complex and it's secret, but it--look, Barack Obama wants to win so badly, as I understand it, everything in the White House is driven by the election and that level of commitment will take them to a point where he's going to show some leg in a way that people are going to say, wow, he really wants the job and this emotional connection could take place.

MATTHEWS: Wow. I do--I am impressed by that.

On Sunday's episode of NBC's Chris Matthews Show (4/3/11), the panel actually talked about criticism of the mainstream media, with some citing the media's Iraq War debacle as a major factor in the rise of blogosphere-based media criticism.

The discussion got somewhat confused along the way, as this segued into a discussion of the entirely unrelated phenomenon of Republican political candidates who do not like to speak to journalists.

Then the Washington Post's Bob Woodward weighed in with a solution. He explained that you can get in good with politicians--I mean, do investigative journalism--if you follow his simple advice: Tell your subjects exactly what you're going to ask them ahead of time, giving them time to come up with answers, and then print their answers.

WOODWARD: I think the survival of the so-called mainstream media has to do with quality. And if you assemble a bunch of questions and go to a candidate and say, "Look, I'm serious. I really want to ask about this," and you take them as seriously as they take themselves--and believe me, they all take themselves seriously.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

WOODWARD: And you've done your homework, they--and you're fair minded and neutral, they are going to engage. When I've done these books on Bush and Obama, I send in--I hate to disclose trade craft here--20-page memos saying this is what I want to ask about.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

WOODWARD: People say, well, you're telling them--you're tipping them off. And I say, yes. I want them to do some homework themselves. I want them to be fully engaged. And I think you can do that with lots of work. And--but if it's just we like to come in and chat about the news of the day, we'll get stiffed.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, they don't need--it's too wild, it's too crazy.

WOODWARD: Yeah.

Today the Washington Post published a tribute to David Broder that featured a few former politicians recalling how Broder was remarkably interested in talking to them. All agreed that Broder was the kind of reporter who wanted to know what they were thinking.

That's a great way to make friends with powerful people. Whether it produces good journalism is another matter entirely. The same can be said of Woodward's advice, which is particularly strange coming after a discussion of the media's Iraq failures. Getting too close to official sources was exactly the problem then; it's unlikely to be the key to the corporate media's "survival." But it's worked wonders for Bob Woodward.

From the Friday broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (2/4/11) came a discussion about how the U.S. supports dictators--which elicited some chuckles. Remember, Mark Shields is the one who plays the "left" on the program.

MARK SHIELDS: Just one little point of personal privilege on Joe Biden, who did take a hit for not being able to say dictator, but in United States politics, I mean, it's always been, if someone is on our side, he is a strongman.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: If he is on the other side, he is a dictator. I mean, that has sort of been the nomenclature throughout. All of these guys who were such stalwart anti-Communists, I mean, the Marcoses of the world, they were--they became dictators when they fell.

DAVID BROOKS: Hey, strongman is a bad word, too. But this was--the policy, I mean....

MARK SHIELDS: No, I'm not arguing with policy. I'm just...

DAVID BROOKS: I mean, I'm not blaming Biden. They told him what to say.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

Laughing about U.S. support for dictators is one thing. Expressing outrage that the U.S. is abandoning a dictator in his hour of need is another. But that's what MSNBC host Chris Matthews appeared to be saying on Morning Joe today (2/7/11), as he explained that all dictators want to hand off control to their children:

It all comes down to the same thing. They want their oldest kid to replace them. And what was the plan for transition for our friend? Did we ever talk to him about it? Did we talk about it, encourage him? That's my view. Character and planning. And I don't see--I feel shame about this. I feel ashamed as an American, the way we're doing this. I know he has to change. I know we're for democracy, but the way we've handled it is not the way a friend handles a matter. We're not handling as Americans should handle a matter like this. I don't feel right about it. And Barack Obama, as much I support him in many ways, there is a transitional quality to the guy that is chilling.

I believe in relationships. I think we all do. Relationship politics is what we were brought up with in this country. You treat your friends a certain way. You're loyal to them. And when they're wrong, you try to be with them. You try and stick with them.

So on the one hand you have public TV pundits chuckling about U.S. support for dictators--this is just the way the world works, apparently. And on the other hand, a host from the supposedly liberal cable news channel is "ashamed" that our government is not doing enough to support Mubarak.

On yesterday's Chris Matthews show on NBC, the assembled journalists all seem to agree that Barack Obama's decision to cut a tax deal with Republicans and come out swinging against the left was great news. Time's Mike Duffy: "These liberals may scream, but they've been screaming about Barack Obama since the beginning. This isn't anything new."

Chris Matthews and NBC's Andrea Mitchell went back and forth about whether this was an actual "Sister Souljah moment" or a "mini moment." But Helene Cooper of the New York Times summed up the conventional wisdom best:

I think President Obama just had a really good week. If you just look at the trajectory of how this week started, on Monday and Tuesday everybody is writing, everybody's talking about he caved in to Republicans. By Wednesday he's out there, he's gone and done this press conference and he's looking very much as if he's standing up to his own party. He's moved towards the independents. He's being, you know, he's very much appealing to the independents that he's going to need in 2012. And now he sees he--we're writing about him standing up to Democrats. And for him that's exactly the place that he wants to be right now at this stage in his presidency.

Gabriel Sherman's piece in New York magazine (10/3/10) on the cable news wars includes a bit of history on MSNBC's firing of progressive host Phil Donahue in 2003; an internal memo at the time worried that the show would be  "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Sherman focuses on MSNBC personality Chris Matthews--who sometimes claims he was opposed to the Iraq War--and his desire to get Donahue fired:

Donahue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former GE CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright. (The two summered together on Nantucket.) Matthews saw himself as MSNBC's biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue's show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

After the item was published, Matthews showed up at Donahue's office and apologized. "He didn’t deny it," Donahue remembers. With the war looming, Sorenson and Griffin decided to take him off the air to make way for 24/7 war coverage.

On May 4, 2010:

What killed President Bush's credibility?  His utter claim that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to search for nuclear weapons.  Because he and his people were dishonest enough to make that claim, he ended up looking like an incompetent when we fought our way into that country and are still fighting our way out, only to find there were no nuclear weapons on hand.

The incompetence became downright staggering when the commander in chief pranced on to an aircraft carrier with that "Mission Accomplished" banner flying overhead.  The bozos couldn't even get the PR right.

Flashback to Chris Matthews on "Mission Accomplished" day (5/1/03):

We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits.

And also a few weeks earlier, when a Saddam Hussein statue was pulled down in Baghdad:

Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today....

We're all neo-cons now....

What's [Howard Dean] going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?

...he would have to take a leave of absence to recover from the shame of having heaped ridicule on a guest who tried to explain to him how Congress could and would pass a healthcare reform bill.

Daily Kos (3/22/10) recalled the January 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, in which guest Rep. Alan Grayson (D.-Fla.)  pointed out that the Senate had already passed a healthcare bill, and that the House could approve it and then pass amendments that the Senate could accept via reconciliation. Matthews' response: "OK, OK. OK, you know, this show is about reality."

Matthews continually mocked Grayson for his supposed ignorance of Senate procedure:

What are you talking about? What procedure do you know that Harry Reid doesn't know?... That Dick Durbin doesn't know? That all those top guys, that Ted Kennedy didn't know?... The secret route to the Indies that only you know about?... Why do you think the president and everybody else is dying over the fact that they lost Massachusetts? Because it didn't matter? You think they're all crazy over there, but you're smart?

Matthews' choice of insults was telling: "This is netroots talk!... This is outsider talk, and you're an elected official...and you know you can't do it. You're pandering to the netroots right now. I know what you're doing!"

By contrast, Matthews cited his insider credentials as a former Capitol Hill staffer to dismiss the lawmaker's analysis:

Well, I worked over there for many, many years, and I worked for the speaker for six years, I worked 15 years up there...and I know what I'm talking about! You ask anybody... you ask anybody in the Senate right now.... Go call the Senate legislative counsel's office and ask them if you can do this. Go ask the parliamentarians if you can do this. You haven't bothered to do that.

Matthews made it abundantly clear that only Beltway insiders are worth listening to, and that Grayson, who's only been in Congress for a little more than a year, didn't qualify: "Every night, we deal with two worlds: the real world of Congress, that has to do things and get things passed; and this outside world, represented by the netroots and the other people out there, like yourself, who play this game...and it doesn't get done!"

The host closed with a confident prediction about healthcare reform: "It's not gonna happen. Anyway, Congressman Alan Grayson, a true believer, who believes he can get things done by willing it!"

On his weekend NBC show, Chris Matthews regularly posts a question to 12 regular pundit/journalists--what he calls "The Matthews Meter." This Sunday (3/14/10), the question was: "Should Obama Move to the Center Instead of the Left as a Reelection Strategy?"

Matthews explained it on the show:

Let's go to the bottom line. We took it to The Matthews Meter, 12 of our regulars. What's the smartest political route for Obama right now, play to the center or to the left? Well, no contest here. Eleven say play to the center; just one says go left.

That's about as clear a statement of the political bias of the corporate press corps as you're likely to see. The advice for Democrats is always the same--move to the right.

The discussion of why this would be a good strategy was about as convincing as the advice itself; one highlight was Matthews asking of Obama: "Do you think he's as good at faking it as Bill Clinton was? Can he pretend to be a centrist?"

A meeting of the minds between NBC host Chris Matthews and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (Chris Matthews Show, 11/29/09):

IGNATIUS: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is--he was going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed.

MITCHELL: Yes.

IGNATIUS: And, you know, I think this, you know, this is not going to....

MATTHEWS: So too much Chamberlain, not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much--too much college professor.

Following the 1992 GOP convention, FAIR's magazine Extra! (11/92) highlighted remarks made by Rich Bond in which the then-Republican national chair explained the strategy behind the right's relentless charges of liberal media bias:

There's some strategy to it. I'm the coach of a kids' basketball team and Little League Teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is "work the refs." Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.

In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews (10/19/09), Pat Buchanan gave a first-hand account of how the strategy paid off for him and at least one other member of the Nixon administration:

BUCHANAN: I know when we hit the New York Times, for example, in the '60s, all of a sudden, they blossomed with an op-ed page that had some conservatives on it and conservative voices there, and all the other newspapers did, as well.

MATTHEWS: That's how you got Bill his job. Is that how you got Bill Safire his job?

[LAUGHTER]

BUCHANAN: Well, listen, they went out looking for conservative--that's how I got my job! Create a vacuum out there and a real demand, you've got to put these people on, Chris, and go to work and....

Like Bond, Buchanan acknowledges that the ploy is disingenuous: In a Los Angeles Times interview (3/14/96) during his 1996 campaign for president, Buchanan praised the media for fairness: "I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage.... For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on Earth does that."

And of course it helps that the corporate media is acutely sensitive to charges of liberal bias--regardless of whether they are true or not.

"It is difficult to overstate President Obama's unpopularity in most of Louisiana," writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article  (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off.

Robertson continues: "He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)" Fourteen percent? Wow, that is unpopular! But given that black and other non-white people have been able to vote in Louisiana for several decades now, wouldn't it make sense to give the actual share of the vote Obama received? That would be 40 percent, which is a pretty disappointing electoral result, but Obama did worse in six other states--and McCain did as bad or worse in 12 states. Yet it would be pretty easy, I would think, to overstate McCain's unpopularity in, say, Maine.

The problem here is treating white opinion as representative of the opinions of the public at large. ("In Louisiana, Tainted Senator Rides Anti-Obama Sentiment" is the print headline.) It's a subtler form of the crude analysis Chris Matthews used to do when Obama was running for the Democratic nomination: "How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community?"

The Times piece is mainly about the re-election prospects of Sen. David Vitter, but it takes time out for a look back at a recent special election race for a Louisiana State Senate seat. The lone Republican in the three-way race bashed his opponents with a flier--which accompanies the story as a graphic--featuring a smiling hippie and the text, "You might be a liberal if you...voted for Barack Obama." But the punchline of the story is that one of the Democrats beat the Republican in the runoff election, 54 percent to 46 percent, which would seem to undercut the story's contention that Obama is to Louisiana voters as garlic is to vampires. But the next line in Robertson's story is, "So given Louisiana's increasingly reddish hue, the prevailing political wisdom is that a real threat to Mr. Vitter would come from his right." Illustrating the old journalism adage: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press (3/1/09):

The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That's $2.3 trillion.  Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people--what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric.  It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

If you want to find out what people in general actually think about President Obama's economic policies, a better way to do so is to ask a statistically representative sample of them. Such efforts generally provide much more positive results than the Dow Jones "metric."

Someone whose feelings you can predict based on what the Dow does, though, is Gregory's NBC colleague Chris Matthews. When stocks go down, Chris Matthews gets mad. Here he is a couple of weeks ago (Hardball, 2/23/09):

I want to ask you when we get back, how does he deal with the fact that he has a scorecard now. It's called the Dow Jones. Every day now--first of all, they're going to nationalize the banks. Then they're not going to nationalize the banks. No matter what they say, the Dow keeps going down. It's down to almost 7,000 now. I used to think 8,000 was the floor. It's heading toward 6,000! People are really getting angry! I'm getting angry!

People have saved money, who are facing retirement, are ripped right now. It's absolutely disturbing, to put it lightly, what this must be saying to people who are retired now. They have a nest egg, a 401(k) that's now a 101(k). They are ripped. I'm only saying it the nice way. They are really angry and they're going to get mad at him if we don't get this market turned around.

We'll be right back with Howard Fineman and see how the president does with his scorecard, and Gene Robinson, can he deal with that Dow Jones scorecard every day in decline?

If you're pulling down a multi-million salary like Chris Matthews, you probably invest quite a bit of it and therefore you might have a lot to lose when the stock market goes down. Your personal losses don't turn the Dow Jones into a "scorecard" for the president, however.

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.

Chris Matthews reacting Bush's speech (as transcribed by the right-wing Media Research Center):

The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that's going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he's still selling it, and that's the tragedy of the last eight years.

The very same Chris Matthews, reacting to a Saddam Hussein statue being pulled down in Baghdad (4/9/03):

We're all neo-cons now.

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of "P.U.-litzer Prizes" (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year's "stinkiest media performances":

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews

This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February--when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE--Fox News

In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O'Reilly Factor program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."...

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD -- Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball

In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters--"regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."

And there's plenty more malodorous journalism to be found in FAIR's extensive archive on corporate news coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.